but you won't work there, you know. My father will sit to
you in his own apartments.'

'Oh, it isn't that; it's the fear of running away, like that gentleman
three days ago.'

'Three days ago? What gentleman?' Mr. Ashmore asked.

'The one who got urgent letters at breakfast and fled by the 10.20. Did
he stand more than one night?'

'I don't know what you are talking about. There was no such
gentleman--three days ago.'

'Ah, so much the better,' said Lyon, nodding good-night and departing.
He took his course, as he remembered it, with his wavering candle, and,
though he encountered a great many gruesome objects, safely reached the
passage out of which his room opened. In the complete darkness it seemed
to stretch away still further, but he followed it, for the curiosity of
the thing, to the end. He passed several doors with the name of the room
painted upon them, but he found nothing else. He was tempted to try the
last door--to look into the room of evil fame; but he reflected that
this would be indiscreet, since Colonel Capadose handled the brush--as a
_raconteur_--with such freedom. There might be a ghost and there might
not; but the Colonel himself, he inclined to think, was the most
mystifying figure in the house.

II

Lyon found Sir David Ashmore a capital subject and a very comfortable
sitter into the bargain. Moreover he was a very agreeable old man,
tremendously puckered but not in the least dim; and he wore exactly the
furred dressing-gown that Lyon would have chosen. He was proud of his
age but ashamed of his infirmities, which however he greatly exaggerated
and which did not prevent him from sitting there as submissive as if
portraiture in oils had been a branch of surgery. He demolished the
legend of his having feared the operation would be fatal, giving an
explanation which pleased our friend much better. He held that a
gentleman should be painted but once in his life--that it was eager and
fatuous to be hung up all over the place. That was good for women, who
made a pretty wall-pattern; but the male face didn't lend itself to
decorative repetition. The proper time for the likeness was at the last,
when the whole man was there--you got the totality of his experience.
Lyon could not reply that that period was not a real compendium--you had
to allow so for leakage; for there had been no crack in Sir David's
crystallisation. He spoke of his portrait as a plain map of the
country, to be consult